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Saturday, 10 December 2016



The experience may be quite ordinary but when it is conveyed with unexpected exactness by some well-chosen words we feel a tremendous pleasure at it. This has little to do with the intended experience, whether it was at the origin of the account or re-presentation or was created by it and exists only within it, the important thing is to see one reality through another. The representation need not be verbal, is not even confined to any one sense; pleasure for a wine lover comes through discerning other flavours and smells or generic memories in the taste and bouquet of a wine. The focus of the pleasure is on the representing event and not on the one represented although the quality and rarity of the latter contributes to the value of the former; the evocation of a childhood memory even or perhaps especially when it is a 'memory' of something that never happened but is merely typical, although specific, rates particularly highly. Schumann's Kinderszenen are a particularly good examples of this. The associated feeling of pleasure includes a sense of power but not a power that can be held on to and used, say to gain control over involuntary memory, but a power of realisation, the promise that you could return to the original experience and know it fully, or gain access to that more energetic realm where the experience is always present and subsists in its proper relations to all other experiences. These relations are impossible to think by any of our objective categories.

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